Well, I’ve finally managed to stop playing long enough. It only took a few weeks.

While it’s true that my desire to own a PS4 was primarily driven by the need to play Persona 5 in its purest form, I’m not letting the system lie dormant until April. Instead, I’ve been obsessively playing both World of Final Fantasy and Gravity Rush for the past few weeks. and while I am enjoying both games immensely, it’s World of Final Fantasy that’s really got me hooked. It pushes every single one of my gamer buttons in the best ways possible while delivering a charmingly nonsensical plot built upon adorable piles of nostalgia.

Although this game represents the maiden voyage of first-time game director Hiroki Chiba, Tetsuya Nomura designed many of the characters original to the game, so it’s unsurprising that many of them look like they could have escaped from a Kingdom Hearts game.

They’re named like Kingdom Hearts characters, too.

The plot is also like something out of a Kingdom Hearts game. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kingdom Hearts. I’ve played most of the games in the franchise. But that plot, y’all. If you can call it a plot. It might be more accurate to describe it as a fever dream made mostly of keyblades and awkwardly positioned zippers.

The plot of your game might be too complicated if it requires flowcharts to explain.

So in World of Final Fantasy, the story follows a pair of twins named Lann and Reynn who have lived in a timeless pocket dimension for some unspecified number of years.

^ Reynn Lann^

One day, a talking white fox with a crown on its butt appears on Lann’s head while he serves coffee at Totally-Not-Starbucks to a mysterious woman who may or may not be God.

The face of God…?

Reynn and Lann discover that they are Pokemon Trainers…I mean, mirage keepers, and they must journey through the mysterious land of Grymoire, a world full of Final Fantasy franchise characters, monsters, locations, and spells. The kingdoms of Grymoire are being annexed by the (clearly evil) Bahamutian Federation. There are a bunch of equally mysterious and clearly evil bad guys in improbable costumes lurking about and muttering ominous things about prophecies.

I wonder how long it takes that knight to put on her parrot cosplay every morning.

Reynn and Lann must embark on an adventure through the kingdoms, running into as many Final Fantasy cameos as possible, capturing mirages, and rediscovering their pasts.

I love it.

The systems underpinning this silly romp through the land of nostalgia are deeply satisfying to the classic JRPG gamer in me. It’s turn-based menu combat, for one thing, which is, as far as I am concerned, the hallmark of a Final Fantasy game (looking askance at you, Final Fantasy XIII and XV).

The Active Time Battle system makes a triumphant return. You can adjust the speed and you can even turn it off, if you like, but I’ve been playing on the second-fastest speed, and I’ve been pleased by the pleasant challenge that this offers, particularly if you’re facing off against a large mob of monsters who are throwing a barrage of attacks at you as you scroll desperately through your menu to select the most effective abilities to defeat your enemies as efficiently as possible. At slower speeds, the ATB drags painfully, and turning the battles from Active to Wait makes them boring, so I would definitely recommend playing them at as fast a speed as you are comfortable.

Most of the strategy, however, comes from organizing your stacks. Your party is comprised of Reynn, Lann, and four of their captured mirages configured into two “stacks.” Basically, you wear adorable renderings of classic Final Fantasy baddies as hats. It’s all very silly.

Alternately, while you are in Lilikin form, large mirages can wear you as a hat. I’m not sure which is sillier.

Despite the undeniable silliness, the whole thing is wonderfully complicated and interesting. By changing which mirages are within which stacks, you are able to completely change the stats, skill load-outs, strengths, and weaknesses of your stacks as a whole. Abilities “stack” as well, meaning that, for example, if you have two mirages in your stack who know Fire, you can cast Fira. It’s an addictive and endlessly customizable system. Especially once you add in the exciting fact that every mirage has its own tiny sphere grid!

*heavy breathing*

Mechanically-speaking, it’s a very solid game. As for the aforementioned plot? Well, it’s a hot mess of madness made even weirder by some cheerfully hammy voice acting and a localization that appears to have been crafted by slightly tipsy hipster nerds. I don’t know if things are a little more sedate in the Japanese voice tracks, but the English version is unilaterally crazypants bananas. When Lann isn’t making a nonsensical non-joke, he is misunderstanding every situation and statement directed towards him, usually in head-scratchingly stupid ways that would only make sense if he were catastrophically stoned 100% of the time.

The rest of the dialogue is equally weird. Tama (the fox with a crown on its butt) speaks the-with the “adorable” the-quirk of adding the word “the”in front of random the-words. Some mirages make up entirely new words.

Some mirages speak in hilariously inappropriate slang.

Even the mirage descriptions climb aboard the redonk train, making terrible puns, Final Fantasy in-jokes, and the occasional American pop-culture reference.

Now, I just want to be clear: I am not complaining. It’s endlessly fascinating to see what weird-ass thing the localization is going to do next. The cutscenes are constant, but they are never boring, because there is a 100% guarantee that someone will say something completely ridiculous. I admire the aplomb and gravitas with which these (presumably) professional, adult voice actors read some of these lines.

The game is quite nice to look at, with a colorful, cartoon-y style and bright, attractive colors. The chibi re-imaginings of classic Final Fantasy characters are more than tolerably charming.

Look at tiny Yuna’s tiny, adorable, angry eyebrows!

The backgrounds are full of depth and rich color, and the monster designs are attractive and varied, though it wouldn’t be a Final Fantasy game without the occasional palette swap.

I have few real complaints about this game thus far. I wish the music were better, but holding the soundtrack of every game up to the Uematsu gold standard is probably unreasonable. There’s nothing in the game’s soundtrack that is bad, exactly, it’s just bland. It sounds a bit like the slow pianos of Kingdom Hearts, but without the groove, and with more lame remixing of old Final Fantasy tunes. Other than this minor gripe, I am having a blast. It’s doing everything I want a game to do, and it’s doing those things pretty well.

Playing World of Final Fantasy is like snorting pixie stix of nostalgia — it’s colorful, saccharine, and kind of weird, but it tastes pretty great.

I am just the worst about buying games and then never getting around to finishing the damn things. Adulting takes up distressingly large chunks of my day, so I no longer have the copious amounts of free time that once I had. This is a problem for all adult gamers, but it is especially a problem for me because my favorite genre, the RPG, is famous for being incredibly long. It’s not uncommon to have to sink over 100 hours into a good, meaty RPG in order to experience all of the content. This means that I have a bunch of RPGs that I have started and am still attempting to finish. Since I don’t like to write up a full review of a game until I am at least halfway through it, I haven’t talked about many of these in-progress games yet on this blog. So here, in no particular order, are my initial impressions of the RPGs that I am currently playing.

Fire Emblem Awakening (3DS)

I’ve already talked a little bit about my first thoughts on this excellent game. I’ve yet to be disappointed in a single aspect of this RPG. The battles are strategic and exciting, the voice acting is top-notch, the graphics and cutscenes are expressive and stunning, the 3D effects are well-executed, and the music is appropriately stirring and cinematic. I haven’t yet gotten around to the “tactical shipping” aspect of the game, but I am looking forward to it. I think? It’s got to be less creepy than Conception II.

Chrono Trigger (DS)

This game was one of my earliest RPG experiences. Soon after I beat Final Fantasy X and VII, one of my friends lent me the PS1 port. I really liked the game, especially the time travel, but I remember having a lot of trouble with the active-time battles. Now that I am a hardened RPG veteran, though, the battles are incredibly fun. I love that you need to take enemy positioning into account while quickly selecting the most appropriate techs. The DS port is excellent and having the menus immediately accessible on the touch screen is incredibly convenient. I had forgotten what an tightly plotted and stunningly beautiful game this is. I had also forgotten what a badass Lucca is. A younger me was most interested in the princess, but now that I’m older and wiser, it’s clear that bespectacled, super-genius Lucca is the most awesome character, an extremely positive representation of ladies in STEM fields since 1995.

Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD Remaster (PS3)

I was very excited when this remaster came out, and it helped me update my very useful blitzball strategy, but I’ve only made as far as the Lightning Plains so far in this playthrough. I am very pleased with inclusion of the expert Sphere Grid, which makes leveling up the characters much more interesting, though completely mystifying to anyone without an already-clear grasp on how the basic Sphere Grid works. The updated graphics and UI are excellent, but the voice acting is more grating and awful than ever (even if I now recognize the mind-blowing fact that Wakka and Bender are voiced by the same dude). Would it have been so hard to include the Japanese voice tracks on this re-release? That might have put this remaster over the edge into the realm of excellence rather than mere competence.

Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth (3DS)

This really is an awesome dungeon crawler, mixing oddly-addictive Etrian Odyssey-style touch-screen dungeon-mapping with Persona’s turn-based, elemental weakness-exploiting combat. This fusion creates an unexpectedly satisfying gameplay loop of exploration and combat that stays fresh throughout the long game because each dungeon is stylistically and mechanically unique. The story is interesting enough, but so heavily dependent upon an encyclopedic familiarity with the story content of Persona 3, Persona 4, and every single one of their spin-off games that it can be a bit challenging to figure out what the hell is going on. Also, you’re going to have to read a surprising amount of really terrible poetry.

Persona 4 Arena (PS3)

Do you like fighting games? Do you also like visual novels? You will need to be a fan of both of these somewhat disparate genres to enjoy this very odd game. As much as I enjoyed Persona 4, I didn’t ever feel the need to pick this particular spin-off, as I am not very good at fighting games. However, when it became clear that I needed to know at least a little bit about the characters in this game to fully understand what was going on in Persona Q, and when some perusal on the internet seemed to suggest that the game actually had a very interesting story mode, I went ahead and picked it up on the PSN. I was very surprised to discover that the story mode consisted of fully-voiced short story-length visual novels broken up periodically with one-one-one fights. But it’s way more reading than fighting. Like way, WAY more. Every character in the game has a chapter, and in true visual novel-style, it’s all told from the first-person perspective of each one in a literary mode that rather reminds me of overly-earnest fanfiction. The fighting mechanics are fun and easy to pick up, but require good timing to make your combos land. If you like reading stuff for ten minutes, then taking a two-minute break to beat up on someone, this is a great game for you. I’m kind of enjoying it.

Kingdom Hearts: Dream Drop Distance (3DS)

I have been eyeballing this game ever since the 3DS debuted and this was advertised as one of the earliest blockbusters for the system. I spied it used at my favorite local game store and finally picked it up a few months ago. I must say, I am extremely impressed by the depth of this game. It looks and plays so much like its classic PS2 predecessors that at times it was difficult to believe I was playing it on a handheld. The 3D is so complex and the battles so frenetic that it can be hard to keep the system lined up properly with your eyes, but when you can keep the 3D in focus, it’s stunning in its depth and detail. There is something really magical about seeing familiar Disney locales utterly transformed by the three dimensions. The touch screen controls are well-implemented and interesting, and there’s even an undeniably Pokemon-esque battle-creature aspect of the game, which uses an interface suspiciously similar to Pokemon X/Y’s Pokemon-Amie, which is odd, because Dream Drop Distance came out over a year and a half before Pokemon X/Y. It’s a really fun interface, though, and any game that lets me have adorable creatures as pets makes me happy. But I’ve just got to say: the Tron levels are fucking creepy. The odd photo-realism of the characters in the Tron levels is weirdly unsettling in three dimensions, especially in its stark contrast to the much more cartoonish look of Sora and the other levels in the game.

Child of Light (PS3)

I love this game so much. Playing it is like a meditation; the smooth, watercolored world of Lemuria is an interactive children’s picture-book wonderland. The music is absolutely gorgeous and I could happily listen to it for hours. I think I drive my roommates crazy, though, because I often can’t help but sing along. The protagonist, Aurora, can fly on gossamer wings, so moving through the maze-like forests, cliffs, and caves of Lemuria controls like a dream. The style of locomotion and general overworld movement seems strongly reminiscent of indie game Aquaria, but the turn-based battle system is all its own. The battles are unexpectedly challenging (though that may be because I am playing on “expert” difficulty) and the story is engaging and interesting. While I love that they wrote every word of the dialogue in rhyme, I really wish that the rhymes were, you know, good. The writers can’t seem to stick to any one meter, and many of the rhymes are terribly skewed slant rhymes. It’s a little painful to read at times. I wish they’d hired a proper poet to do the job and made the game’s linguistics as stunning as its visuals.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call (3DS)

I would have loved to be present for the concept pitch for this game. “Well, you see, it’s a casual Final Fantasy-themed dungeon-crawling DDR game that you play with your DS stylus!” That’s the whole game. And weirdly, it works really well, mostly due to the brilliance of Nobuo Uematsu‘s music. There are so many classic, wonderful, moving, beautiful, badass songs to choose from over the life of the franchise that it seems entirely appropriate to have an entire game about it. In fact, they should have just named the game Final Fantasy: Nobuo Uematso Is Amazing instead of making up a nonsense portmanteau. The game play is really fun and very tricky at higher levels, too, but let’s not kid ourselves. We’re here for the music. Play this one with headphones for sure.

Broken Age (PC)

I both love and hate this game. I love it for its quirky style, its fascinating world, its hilarious and well-voiced dialogue, and its satisfying story. I hate it for its unrepentant adventure game non-logic. While I understand that this game represents a tremendous leap away from the bat-shit crazy puzzles of the previous generation of adventure games (for some impressive examples, see Cracked’s latest article about terrible video game puzzles), there are still some pretty nonsensical things you have to figure out. I have been pleasantly surprised at how many things I have been able to figure out on my own, but some of the puzzles are just irritatingly complicated or vague. For instance, the knot puzzle (a puzzle that is coincidentally one of the puzzles featured in the aforementioned Cracked article) has kept me stalled in this game for over a month. I know I will eventually go back to it, because I really want to find out what happens, but I’m too frustrated with it for the moment. Stupid, awesome game.

Life Is Strange

I’ve only played through a few hours of the first chapter of this game so far, but I already like what I see. The time-traveling mechanic is very intuitive and cleverly designed, turning the protagonist’s life into what is essentially a video game that she can reset at will. This gives the player free reign to try every option in a given situation – if you don’t like where the story is going, you can rewind time to take a different path, and choose the one you like best. What’s fascinating is to see how your choices affect the world around you. The game’s settings seem fully realized, and the voice acting is uncommonly excellent. I am looking forward to seeing how this story turns out.

And there you have most of what I am playing. The most interesting things I am playing, certainly. I really just need to pick one, buckle down, and beat it. I’m just easily distracted.

I was happy to discover that Square Enix has a survey to gather feedback about their Final Fantasy XV demo, because I have a lot of opinions about it. So I’m really glad Squeenix allowed me to share the following with them:

“This did not feel like a Final Fantasy game. It plays like Skyrim meets Kingdom Hearts II.

Let’s be honest, it also LOOKS like Skyrim meets Kingdom Hearts, too.

Now, I’m not certain that’s necessarily a bad thing, as I enjoy both of those games, but it’s not really what I’m looking for in my numbered Final Fantasy games. The battle system was almost fun once I started to get used to it, and with a bit more practice, I think I might actually enjoy it. I will say, though, if there are unskippable quicktime events at the start of every boss battle, then this game will tire my patience quickly. Navigation was difficult, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to find the entrance to the Behemoth’s canyon every time I wanted to head back there after camping, but after I figured out how to set destination markers on the map, I was able to navigate a little better. A word of advice: if you’re going to have an open world design ala Skyrim, copy one more thing from Skyrim, the quick travel. Being able to teleport to already-visited locations makes an open world fun to explore instead of a boring chore across which to journey.

I might have forgiven many of these issues if the demo contained a compelling story, or even a story at all; alas, Episode Duscae is largely free of context, making it difficult for me to determine how I felt about any of the characters. I know I feel slightly irritated that the entire party is male.

Quite the sausage party.

One of the most compelling things about Final Fantasy as a series is the typical inclusion of strong, interesting men AND women as playable characters. Yuna, Terra, Celes, Fran, Tifa – the list goes on. Your frankly baffling decision to make the party all one sex, thereby guaranteeing that at least half of your potential audience remains unrepresented was unfortunate, but forgivable – I’ve played men in great games before, and I’ll do it again. However, I was in fact more dismayed after finishing the demo.

In the demo, only one female character has a name or interacts with the party, and that is Cindy, the ridiculously and almost offensively sexualised Cindy. When you arrive at your party’s broken car, all you see is Cindy’s butt.

YOU THINK I AM JOKING

Seriously, her NPC model is bent over, frozen, with her ass in the air, and she remains that way until your quest is achieved and the garage reopens. Her model just stands there, thrusting her ass into Noctis’ face. It’s utterly ridiculous, and it made me laugh when I saw it, but in disbelief rather than delight. This is my gender representation?

Also, this is not how boobs even work.

A pin-up girl mechanic in daisy dukes?

Sure, you dressed Fran in lingerie, but at least I got to have her shoot bitches in the face with arrows and intone cryptic warnings about the Mist.

Even wearing inexplicable stilettos, she can kick your ass.

This was a pretty big disappointment, SquareEnix. I’m glad Final Fantasy Type-0 HD turned out to be so amazing. You can keep ogling Cindy’s butt. I’ll be over here, stabbing bad guys with a longsword as Queen, one of those awesome female characters that you’re usually so good at.”